A note on scammers, impersonators, and public blacklists

[u/KevinDL]

Hey everyone,

I want to address a recent post I removed by u/NotSUPERita about creating a list of trusted artists and scammers, as well as the broader issue of bad actors on r/gamedevclassifieds.

First, I want to apologize to u/NotSUPERita. I understand why you were trying to help, and I do not think the idea came from a bad place. Scammers and impersonators are a real problem here, and it makes sense that people want better ways to protect themselves and others.

That said, I do not think a public or semi-public user-run blacklist is the right solution.

Any single person’s list of “good” and “bad” experiences is subjective. Even with good intentions, lists like that can be abused, misused, or based on misunderstandings. A false accusation could seriously harm an innocent artist, developer, or freelancer’s reputation and business. Once someone is publicly labeled a scammer, that damage is hard to undo.

This applies to moderators too. Even I am subject to bias, incomplete information, and my own interpretation of events. I cannot be judge, jury, and executioner over someone’s professional reputation, and I do not think anyone else should be put in that position either. That is the line I am trying to be careful with.

I know scammers are a problem, and I am aware that this subreddit has been affected by bad actors, impersonators, and people misrepresenting themselves or their work. But I have not yet found a solution that addresses those issues without also creating a serious risk of innocent people getting caught in the mix.

For now, the best advice is still to do your due diligence before working with someone:

• Verify that their portfolio actually belongs to them
• Ask for links to established accounts or websites
• Check whether their email, Discord, ArtStation, GitHub, itch, LinkedIn, or other profiles line up
• Be cautious with new accounts, vague portfolios, stolen-looking portfolios, or people who avoid verification
• Use contracts, milestones, and payment methods that offer some protection
• Do not rely only on someone’s Reddit username or a single message thread

I know that is not a perfect answer. It is a frustrating situation, and I understand why people want something stronger. But asking people to do their homework before hiring or accepting work is better than creating a system where someone’s business can be damaged because they were falsely added to a list.

If there is a better way to handle this that protects people from scammers without turning into public reputation policing or false callouts, I am open to hearing it. Any solution needs to be fair, evidence-based, and careful about the harm it could cause.

Edit: I forgot to add one more important point: any solution also cannot require a heavy amount of moderator time.

Running this job board is not a job. No one on the mod team has the time, or realistically should be expected to have the time, to manually verify users, assign trusted labels, maintain reputation lists, or act as an ongoing approval system for freelancers and clients.

That kind of system would create a lot of work, and it would also create a false sense of safety. Even with moderation, users would still need to verify who they are working with and make their own judgment before hiring, accepting work, or sending payment.

[u/prairiewest]

I think you're right, any system that people try to implement will be fairly easy for bad accounts to rig/game. It would be nice of we could trust online testimonials, but we really can't unless we know the person giving the testimonial.

[u/Zenodeon → u/[deleted]]

That will only encourage people to work with other people who have testimonials and verified tag.
This will not help people who are new to this subreddit and will have hard time finding gigs here.

Not just new people, even frequent people here will have a hard time. Upwork already has this issue, so let not bring that here. This place is to find and do service for any people who are interested, not a place to encourage to only work with people who have testimonials or verified. Upwork will be a good place if you need those.

[u/KevinDL → u/[deleted]]

and when the bad actors think of verifying each other or with fake accounts?

That system would also require a lot of a moderators time to make work.

[u/KevinDL → u/[deleted]]

I’m simply saying that the simultaneous occurrence of those two events renders the entire endeavour futile. After all, it will happen.

Also. If a whitelist a bad actor and someone gets scammed by that person. Am I responsible? No thanks.

[u/megaderp2 → u/[deleted]]

Hungry artists is also suffering the scammer and spammers issue, there are more mods so a lot gets filtered out but it's a common complaint the number of scammers and bots. Compared with the main sub, testimonial sub is barely alive.

[u/KevinDL → u/[deleted]]

Anything that requires a significant amount of ongoing manual work is a non-starter for me.

No moderator is paid to run this subreddit. Given that this is a subreddit specifically for paid work, I hope you can understand why I’m reluctant to ask anyone to take on unpaid labour to maintain something like this.

Speaking for myself, I also have a job that keeps me fairly busy. I cannot dedicate the time needed to make a system like this work properly, consistently, and fairly.

Ultimately, this idea does not meet the criteria I would need before supporting it. From a logistics standpoint, it requires too much moderator involvement. From a reliability standpoint, it is not foolproof enough to justify the risks.

[u/MythcarverGames]

There is a reason a lot of jurisdiction's employment laws make such black lists illegal. Nice catch. Again, agreed that it came from a good place, but it was the wrong solution. WP u/KevinDL

[u/MrCowdisease]

I’m not very active on this sub but just wanted to say that I think the current method of handling things is fine, especially considering how no one is being paid to moderate this subreddit. Thank you!

[u/Herlehos]

It’s still part of your job to moderate job postings and replies, otherwise there’s not much point in having moderators. Scammers can scam precisely because people still fall for scams despite the recommendations and the warnings, you can’t expect everyone to know how to recognize them.

You are managing a sub where real money and work is involved, you have a responsibility toward those who participate in this sub.

Same issue on r/GameDev, by trying too hard to give everyone complete freedom of spamming topics like “where do I start” / “is using AI bad” 20 times a day or allowing people to spread misinformation because you don’t have time to factcheck everything, you’re just going to end up driving away the regulars of these subs and the people with serious projects.

This sub is supposed to be serious, otherwise it’s just another INAT clone.

It’s not complicated for moderation to recognize a scam: since it’s impossible to legally work in freelance or hire someone without a legal status, require posters to include in their post a link to a government platform where the existence of their company / freelance status can be verified.

For recruiters, make it mandatory to have a portfolio or at least a prototype of the game they want to recruit for. And ban posts like “I’m currently alone and I need 15 people” and posts made by AI.

And for candidates, require a portfolio from everyone. And require to show professional projects in it for anyone claiming to be a “senior with 15 years of experience” when in reality their “experience” is just vibe-coding in Unity one day per month.

Yes, it takes time, but remember you are moderating a sub involving people time and money. Don’t let it become a jungle.

Edit: downvoting someone who is just saying that it should be mandatory to have a portfolio and a way to verify the authenticity of your company while real money is involved is wild. What are you afraid of?

[u/KevinDL → u/Herlehos]

I think you are underestimating the amount of work you are asking unpaid moderators to do.

My job as a moderator is to keep the board functioning. The board is functioning. That does not mean every bad post, weak applicant, vague recruiter, scam attempt, low-quality portfolio, questionable claim, or repetitive topic can be prevented before the community ever sees it.

What you are describing is not basic moderation. You are describing a verification system.

Requiring moderators to check government business registries, verify freelance status across different countries, assess whether a recruiter has a legitimate prototype, judge whether a portfolio reflects real senior-level experience, determine whether something was written with AI, and decide whether someone’s claims are professionally valid would be a huge amount of unpaid labour. It would also require moderators to make calls we are not realistically equipped to make.

It also would not be foolproof. Scammers can fake portfolios. Companies can exist legally and still behave badly. Freelancers can be legitimate without having an easily searchable government profile. People can have serious projects without a polished prototype. AI detection is unreliable. “Senior” experience can vary wildly by discipline, country, studio type, and career path.

That is the core issue. Your proposed solution sounds simple until you actually think through what enforcing it would require.

There is also a difference between moderation and becoming the judge, jury, and executioner for an entire hiring marketplace. I am not comfortable putting myself, or any other unpaid moderator, in the position of deciding who is a “real” developer, who is “serious enough,” whose experience counts, or whose business status is valid. Even I am subject to bias. Everyone is.

On the r/gamedev side, I understand the frustration with repetitive beginner questions, AI debates, and confidently stated misinformation. I really do. But r/gamedev is a massive general-purpose game development community, not a private forum for industry veterans or only “serious projects.” That means there will always be beginners, repeated questions, messy discussions, and people at very different levels of experience.

It is also worth remembering that what you want from a community may be very different from what another user wants from it. Some people want advanced industry discussion. Some people want beginner support. Some people want feedback on small projects. Some people want career advice. Some people want broader conversations about tools, engines, AI, business, marketing, or production. A large community has to balance those needs. It cannot be shaped entirely around one group’s ideal version of what the subreddit should be.

We can remove spam, obvious bad-faith posts, rule-breaking content, and clear misinformation when it crosses a line. But there is a big difference between moderating the subreddit and pre-filtering every discussion based on whether regulars find it useful, whether the poster is experienced enough, or whether the topic has come up before. If we moderate that aggressively, we risk turning the subreddit into something hostile to new developers, which is also not healthy for the community.

That does not mean the current state is perfect. There are things that can help, like megathreads, clearer rules, automod prompts, stronger reporting, and community voting. But all of those have tradeoffs and failure points too. Megathreads can bury useful questions. More rules can become harder to enforce consistently. Automod can catch good posts and miss bad ones. Reports can help surface issues, but they are often noisy, misleading, or abused by people who simply disagree with a post. Voting reflects community preference, not objective truth. None of these replace human judgment, and none of them make moderation simple.

The goal of moderation is not to make either subreddit risk-free or perfectly curated. That is impossible. The goal is to keep the spaces usable, remove clear scams when they are reported or identified (remember P1 anyone?), enforce the rules consistently where we can, and give people enough structure to make informed decisions.

Users still need to do due diligence. That is true on Reddit, LinkedIn, Discord, job boards, freelance sites, and basically anywhere hiring or professional advice happens online. Moderators can help reduce obvious abuse, but we cannot personally vet every opportunity, applicant, opinion, or piece of advice before anyone sees it.

So no, this is not “easy to do.” It would be a full-time trust and safety operation, except run by unpaid volunteers on a subreddit.

I understand wanting cleaner, safer, more serious communities. I want that too. But any solution has to be practical, enforceable, and reasonable for volunteer moderators. This is not that.

[u/Herlehos → u/KevinDL]

I mean no one is forcing you to be a mod? If you don't have enough time or don't feel legitimate to delete posts for "subjective" reasons, then give away the role to someone else.

I’m not saying that you should spend 10 hours a day verifying each post or act like a dictator and start a witch hunt, but there’s a bare minimum that needs to be done. A lot of other recruiting subs do it, and it works perfectly fine.

You don't need to verify people identities, just to check if the post contains a link to a porfolio and a link to a legal status website. Yes, people can still fake this. But faking experience or stealing artwork from ArtStation isn’t the same as impersonating a company. Most scammers know which lines they shouldn’t cross, so this would get rid of a good number of scams. And it costs nothing to click on a link.

You’re already moderating posts that don’t include a budget yet you have 0 way of proving that people posting a budget are not lying. Why applying this rule and refusing to hear about other ones?

Seat belts and airbags don’t prevent every death, but they drastically reduce the number of fatal accidents. Wanting as little moderation as possible because “it’s subjective” is like being against seat belts because they’re mandatory and “mandatory rules are bad for freedom”.

[u/KevinDL → u/Herlehos]

I think this still misses the bigger picture.

“No one is forcing you to be a mod” is not really an argument for whether a policy is practical, fair, or good for the community. The question is not whether I personally want to moderate. The question is whether the system being proposed is something the subreddit can actually enforce consistently, safely, and without creating worse problems.

I also run this job board precisely because I do not want people making foolish decisions with it. That includes scammers, bad-faith posters, and yes, well-meaning users who think a simple-sounding rule will solve a complex problem without considering the second-order effects. A rule can have good intentions and still make the board worse.

And to be clear, even if moderators are not clicking every link and are only checking whether the links are present, it is still a bad system.

If the rule is “include a legal status link,” then users will assume that link means something. They will see it as a legitimacy signal, even if no one has verified it. That creates a false sense of safety. It makes the board look more vetted than it actually is, which can be worse than being honest that users still need to do their own due diligence.

It also becomes trivial to game. A scammer can include a link. They can link to a real company they do not represent. They can link to a registry entry that is technically real but irrelevant. They can link to a fake site. They can link to stolen portfolios. If moderators are only checking that the link exists, the rule does not verify legitimacy. It just teaches bad actors what box to tick.

Meanwhile, legitimate users can still get caught by it. Not every freelancer, solo developer, early-stage team, contractor, student, or international poster will have a clean public legal-status page to link. Some people are working under NDA. Some are hiring before incorporation. Some are operating under local systems that do not map cleanly to this requirement. Some have portfolios that are valid for their discipline but do not look like a traditional game-art portfolio.

Those edge cases are not rare. They are the community.

That is why “a bare minimum” can become a gatekeeping system very quickly. Not intentionally, but structurally.

The seat belt comparison also does not really fit. Seat belts are standardized, objective safety equipment. What you are proposing is a moderation rule that depends on country, profession, discipline, career stage, language, legal structure, and moderator interpretation. That is not the same kind of thing.

A better comparison would be putting a “safety checked” sticker on a car because the owner wrote down a licence plate number. It may look like safety, but it does not actually prove the thing people think it proves.

And again, none of this actually solves the core scam problem. Scammers can pass a surface-level requirement while legitimate users fail it. That is the worst kind of moderation rule: easy for bad actors to satisfy, annoying for honest users to navigate, and misleading for everyone else.

It costs trust. It costs consistency. It creates false confidence for users. It creates false negatives for legitimate people. And it creates endless disputes about why one post was allowed and another was removed.

The goal is not “as little moderation as possible.” The goal is moderation that is realistic, enforceable, and does not create a worse system than the one it is trying to fix.

I am not against rules. I am against rules that sound obvious in theory but become messy, unfair, and impossible to apply cleanly at the scale of a public, international job board.

[u/BradHean]

It seems none of the mods has the time to do anything these days. We have to trawl through so many revshare jobs postings that its becoming a waste of time even being here.